Archive

Have you wanted an easy way to make the little “favicons” that appear next to the URLs in your browser? No need for ICO programs, image editors, or even a magic lamp. Here’s a great website that turns your images into the ICO format for use as a favicon:

A common question I get is how to control commenting in your ECU Blog, so I’d like to devote this week’s edition of Web Wednesday to WordPress comments. There’s many options, so you should spend some time looking at them to determine what you should enable or disable on your own blog.

To access the comment settings, you can log into your WordPress Dashboard and go to Settings->Discussion.

The first major control is whether to enable commenting for any new posts you make. This is controlled by the Allow people to post comments on new articles setting. You can still override this for each post, so again, this is just a default setting.

Another major feature is Users must be registered and logged in to comment. This requires users to have an ECU PirateID to post comments, and also restricts commenting to users that have been added specifically to your blog via the Dashboard. This is great for group discussion when you don’t want outside viewers to participate.

Lastly I’d like to talk about comment moderation. This is very good to keep on to ensure only appropriate comments are shown on your blog. There’s two options, which are An administrator must always approve the comment and Comment author must have a previously approved comment. The first requires the blog administrator to approve all comments, regardless of the second setting. The other option is to only hold the comment for moderation if the commenter hasn’t had a comment approved before. Once a commenter has been approved one time on your blog, all of their comments will be automatically approved from then on. For blogs that have quite a bit of commenting, or situations where you’re too busy to handle approving comments from some of the same users, this second option will ease your troubles, provided that you have the first option turned OFF.

Those are just a few of the features on the commenting system, and there’s quite a bit of fine tuning that can be done. I encourage you all to get in there and tweak to perfection!

This week on Web Wednesday we’re talking some more about security on your MyWeb. Using PiratePanel you can customize the security on your main folder, and subfolders. What if you want to wipe out all the customized security settings and reset everything to one common setting? Well that’s easy to do! Log into PiratePanel via http://myweb.ecu.edu and after logging in and selecting your site to manage, go to Site Security. If you change your main folder’s security settings, it will automatically propagate to all subfolders also. That means that if you have “Public” folders underneath your main folder, and you switch the top-level folder to “Private”, all of your folders, including the previously public ones, are now private.

This is an excellent way to get back to a simpler security configuration, so that you can get things just the way you want them.

This week on Web Wednesday we’re talking about setting permissions in MyWeb. If you have a website that you want to give someone else access to, it’s very simple. Here’s how:

To give someone access to your site, you can go to PiratePanel (via myweb.ecu.edu or piratepanel.ecu.edu), login, and select Manage Web Space. Once there, you can use the Configure Site Security to see who has access to your site. You can switch the site from private (only you can see it) to public (everyone can see it), or even to custom (you specify who can see it).

To add a specific person, select the Custom access option, and you’ll see a Custom Permissions window displayed. This lists what users have access to your site, and what level of access they have. Using this screen, you can add any Pirate ID to the access list. If you give them “Modify” access, they can access your site via PiratePanel and add/delete files. Full access will also give users the ability to manage your entire site, including the access list. This is perfect for departmental sites where many users will be making changes.

If you want to add a group to the access list, you can do it by adding the group’s “alias name”, which can be found in Outlook. Search the address book for the group (for instance, every class and section has it’s own group), and open the address book entry. On the address book entry, there will be a field called Alias name. That name is accepted into PiratePanel so you can grant access to an entire class without typing in the students individually.

You can customize your site’s security any way you wish using this screen, so try it out and see for yourself!

The Contact Form 7 plugin has been installed on blog.ecu.edu. This plugin allows you to design a contact form, which can be mailed to you when someone completes it. You can also manage multiple contact forms.